Better, Faster and More Efficient Clinical Trials
Using health data to help clinical trials improve people’s lives faster.
Clinical trials are research studies involving people that aim to find better treatments or healthcare interventions – like surgeries, screening programmes, and more.
Because trials aim to find such important results, they must be conducted with great care and lots of data to prove the treatment or intervention improves lives. But this takes time, money and resource.
We’re working to transform the technology we use to conduct clinical trials to make them better, faster and more efficient. We believe data that is already collected by the NHS can be used to:
- Identify and invite people to take part, speeding up how fast clinical trials can start
- Compliment data that is collected in the study, making trials more efficient
- Measure the impact of treatments and interventions long-term, giving us a better understanding of how they affect people’s lives
Projects
Project
Efficient assessment: ascertainment, adjudication and analysis of trial outcomes
Traditionally clinical trial outcomes are recorded as single reports (often with handcrafted
Narrative descriptions) at face-to-face research clinic visits. Typically, original medical records are...
Project
Regulator-grade data quality, EHRs and outcome assessment in late-phase clinical trials
A seconded staff member to NHS Digital is looking at the process of data getting from site records into central administrative datasets. This will determine whether these datasets meet the...
Current
Data-driven clinical trial to find a treatment for COVID-19 (RECOVERY trial)
Conducting data-driven clinical trials that are better, faster and more efficient than ever before, is one of Health Data Research UK’s national priorities. Electronic health records hold the...
Latest news and opinion
Opinion
Clinical trials Day 2022: How data can make trials faster, more efficient and better at improving care
We explore how routinely collected health data may hold the key to super-charging how clinical trials are delivered, and in turn, how quickly we can bring improvements to people's lives.
Opinion
Two years on from RECOVERY: paving the way to a data-enabled future for clinical trials
On the second anniversary of the RECOVERY trial, we look at how access to routine clinical healthcare data was a key element of its success in finding treatments for COVID-19. And how...
Public and Patient Story
Filling in the gaps: smart use of health data lies behind the RECOVERY trial’s success
The RECOVERY Trial -a major multi-arm randomised clinical trial that is testing how best to treat people in hospital with COVID-19- has been has delivered some of the best news of the pandemic so...
